


you mourn, but your blood is flowing

by genenuinely



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Homophobia, Conversations, First Time, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Post-Canon, Reflection, post-resurrection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-01
Updated: 2021-03-01
Packaged: 2021-03-14 01:54:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29785389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/genenuinely/pseuds/genenuinely
Summary: Memories flashed before his eyes, like mosaics in a sept. Jon Snow’s grey hand in his, while Satin trimmed his nails. The frozen blood caking his ribcage, and him wiping it away, gently, trying not to take off any skin. The frost growing over his eyelids. He thought,If I’d known you would come back, I would have dressed your wounds, I would have had your clothes ready.Instead, two days ago, at the hour of the wolf, Jon Snow had risen inside his cell and torn away the door, then walked naked and barefoot through Castle Black until Melisandre found him. The men who’d seen him thought he was a ghost. It was only the next morning, when Ghost the direwolf woke Satin early in the Flint Barracks, that he found the splintered door, and the empty table in the ice cell, and anyone had known Jon Snow had risen again.The lord commander and his steward have a conversation.
Relationships: Satin Flowers/Jon Snow
Comments: 7
Kudos: 26





	you mourn, but your blood is flowing

Jon Snow was sitting at the window in Lady Melisandre’s quarters, as still as if he’d been carved from ice. His hand rested on the head of his great white direwolf, who was perched on his haunches beside him. It seemed to Satin that Ghost had grown even larger since he’d last seen him — he was easily the size of a pony, and sat on hindquarters, he was the same height as his master. He did not unsettle Satin the way he once had, but even so, there was something altogether too clever about him: a quickness in the eyes that had not been there before Jon Snow had been killed.

They made a striking portrait. Jon was wrapped in furs; beneath them, Satin could see, he wore nothing at all. The grey skin of his left shoulder was exposed to the cold. _It would be easier, if it weren’t for his skin._ Before the Wall, Satin had never seen a dead man, but he’d been sure they couldn’t look so different from a living one. He’d been wrong. It was in the skin that you noticed death first. It turned colourless as the blood left its surface. If you left the bodies out long enough, they grew bloated, and then the skin stretched and turned pruny like fingers in bathwater. If you kept them in the snow, though, the skin cracked — hairline fractures running up and down the face, pale scars, as if the cold had found pathways into the body.

He knew Jon Snow had a dead man’s skin. He had watched him grow pale and his blood turn black in those long, cold nights in the ice cell. It did not seem possible that sorcery could undo what death had done to him.

Satin did not knock — he did not think he made a sound — but Jon turned anyway, in unison with Ghost, and the sight of his face made Satin’s breath hitch in his throat. His eyes were the same, but they looked so much darker in his face, so that even in the warm light of Melisandre’s flames Satin could not tell they were anything but black. His hair, now streaked through with white, framed his jaw and made him appear gaunter than he already was. He was so _severe_. He looked like he might have built the Iron Throne with his bare hands. Satin had a reckless urge to kneel before him and kiss his hand, as if Jon Snow himself were the king.

Ghost padded toward Satin and snuffled his hand. Satin let him, though he had seen the direwolf savage a queen’s man’s calf not a fortnight earlier. (He could not be sure, but he thought it was because the man had been blustering about the vanquished Lord Snow.) Satisfied he was trustworthy, Ghost circled the room once, then flopped down on the hearth and rested his muzzle on his paws.

Jon Snow watched them intently. Satin cleared his throat. “I’ve brought your things, my lord,” he said.

Jon nodded. Satin set the clothes he’d brought at the foot of the great oaken bed. They were in the King’s Tower, in one of the chambers claimed by Lady Melisandre. There was a grandeur to the room that was absent from the armoury quarters they had once shared. Strange, that Jon would settle here.

“You should come sit by the fire,” he said.

Jon Snow raised his burned hand to the base of his throat. Then he spoke. “I can’t feel the cold anymore.” His voice was so soft Satin had to turn his ear toward him. “Nor the fires. I think… I think I never will again.”

Satin did not know what to say to that. He touched the furs on the bed. They did not look as though they had been used in a long time.

“Val said it’s best to ease into the warmth,” Jon continued. “When the cold starts to set in — warm up too quickly, and the blood cracks in your veins.”

Leathers had told Satin much the same thing, once when Satin had been warming his hands after duty on the Wall. Now he only frowned. Lady Melisandre, Tormund, even Devan Seaworth… now Val, too.

 _You are the lord commander’s steward,_ he told himself, _not his personal favourite. You are not one for strategizing. Why should he want to see you?_

The summons had not even come from Jon himself — Devan had sought Satin out at Lady Melisandre’s behest. Satin had nothing he could give him, aside from a pair of breeches and a boiled leather jerkin. Even so…

He could not help himself. “My lord, what — what’s going to happen?” _Jon Snow is dead._ “Lady Melisandre, Tormund Giantsbane, Val…” _Jon Snow is sitting upright in this room, speaking to me._ “What are you planning to do?”

Jon turned to look at him. He removed his hand from the base of his throat. Where it had been, Satin saw the familiar black streak of the knife wound he’d taken. He swallowed. He might have said more; might have said, _I would follow you, anywhere you lead,_ the way he’d wanted to weeks ago; _I would break oaths for you_. But now Jon was looking at him with the solemnity and severity of a king, and he could not find the words.

“You’ve been cut,” Jon whispered.

Cut, bruised, battered, worse… Satin could not match his gaze. “You should hear what they’ve promised to do to you, my lord,” he said. It did little to ease the heaviness in the air. He sat down on the bed.

“Who did it?”

“This one?” Satin touched the cut. It ran down his cheek like a teardrop. It was not very deep, but each morning, looking in the mirror, he could not help but dread the scar it would leave behind. “That was Alf of Runnymudd, my lord.” He did not mention the swollen lip hidden beneath his beard, nor the light bruise at his temple. “I believe he was feeling vindictive, after Garth…”

“He will pay for this,” Jon said solemnly.

Satin might have said that he did not altogether blame Alf, who had gone half mad after Garth Greyfeather died; he had not been the first to cut him, even, only the first to do it on his face. Even then — the black brothers had not been the worst of it. He cocked his head. “It might have been worse. I might have been killed.”

 _That_ very nearly made Jon Snow smile.

Satin’s gaze fell again to the black scar over Jon’s collarbone. As if self-conscious for the first time, Jon shifted the furs over his shoulders to hide it from view. Satin frowned. “Does it hurt?” he asked.

Jon closed his eyes. “All the time.”

“I saw them, when you were… while you were… In the ice cell, I cleaned them.” It came tumbling out, the memories flashing before his eyes, like mosaics in a sept. Jon Snow’s grey hand in his, while Satin trimmed his nails. The frozen blood caking his ribcage, and him wiping it away, gently, trying not to take off any skin. The frost growing over his eyelids. He thought, _If I’d known you would come back, I would have dressed your wounds, I would have had your clothes ready._

Instead, two days ago, at the hour of the wolf, Jon Snow had risen inside his cell and torn away the door, then walked naked and barefoot through Castle Black until Melisandre found him. The men who’d seen him thought he was a ghost. It was only the next morning, when Ghost the direwolf woke Satin early in the Flint Barracks, that he found the splintered door, and the empty table in the ice cell, and anyone had known Jon Snow had risen again.

“Something is inside me,” said Jon. His eyes were still half shut. “I was a wolf, and then I saw flames, brighter and hotter than Lady Melisandre’s. They were like dragonflame. I saw the cold, too — beyond the wall, beyond the Frostfangs. The heart of winter. Then I saw my brother’s face. He put his fingers to my mouth and bid me open it. I did as he told me. The flames came inside me, and the cold.” He shivered. When he looked at Satin again, his eyes were glassy.

“Lady Melisandre believes the light of R’hllor brought me out of death. When Val saw me, she said it was the work of Others. She wouldn’t touch me. Who has the right of it, I wonder?”

Satin frowned. He felt as though he’d just been given a riddle, the kind Pyp often lobbed at Grenn. “Neither,” he said. Jon watched him unblinkingly. “It was your brother who brought the ice and fire inside you. If I treated your wounds with Myrish fire, you would say it was I who healed you, not the Myrman who made it.”

“All my brothers are dead,” said Jon Snow.

“Someone wearing his face, then.” Satin thought of the weirwood mask he’d seen on a wildling woodswitch. He chose his words carefully. “My lord, forgive me, but does it matter? _Something_ brought you back, god or ghost. I don’t expect they did so seeking your thanks. Surely it counts more what you do with this” — he looked at Jon’s wan face then, and could not bring himself to call it life — “this chance, now that you have it.”

 _And what_ will _you do?_ he yearned to ask. He had said too much already.

Jon was studying him, and the absurdity of it all hit Satin suddenly — here he was, giving counsel to a dead man. It had not yet been a moon’s turn, and yet he felt like he’d forgotten everything he’d learned as Jon’s steward — he’d turned rash and hot-tempered, and so quickly it frightened him. His caution had become cunning. He was not sure he knew how to be patient anymore, how to hold his tongue; he was not sure he wanted to.

“Tormund says that the wildlings will back me,” Jon said at last. Tormund had the right of it, Satin thought: there were at least a dozen free folk outside the entrance to the King’s Tower at all hours. “What of the Watch? Do you know how many traitors there were?”

Satin wondered how broad his definition of a traitor was. He’d counted only four knife wounds, but he knew more had been there when they were made. More still muttered into their cups that they wished they’d done the deed themselves.

“All of Marsh’s men, and some of Yarwyck’s. Most of the builders weren’t there that night, my lord,” Satin said. “Septon Cellador — I’ve heard he’s been preaching that an evil has been vanquished. So perhaps more of the southron men as well.”

Jon rubbed a hand over his face. “Perhaps the better question is how many men aren’t traitors.”

“Leathers, Jax, Horse, Arron and Emrick, Hop-Robin, Rory…” It seemed a pitiful small list. “More along the Wall, surely, my lord. There was a raven from Long Barrow a few days ago.”

“Can Clydas be trusted?”

Clydas had not said a word to him, could not even look him in the eye, but he had offered Satin poultices for his bruises and given him dreamwine. “I think so, my lord. He hasn’t argued with Bowen Marsh, but I don’t believe he’s pleased to see him in power.”

“I”ll need a list,” Jon said. “Perhaps we can’t hang everyone, but if enough are gone, the ones left might be subdued.”

Satin swallowed. _It’s only a list; you won’t be tying the noose yourself._ Though he was not entirely sure that Jon wouldn’t ask him to do that, too. His eyes were hard, as if daring Satin to object. He was offering Satin tremendous power; but if Satin was wrong about someone, or left a name off? He was not sure which would feel worse. All he said was, “Yes, my lord.”

“Afterwards, I’ll lead a host to Winterfell. We’ll see if what Ramsay Snow writes is true.”

“What of Hardhome, my lord?” Satin asked.

Jon shook his head. “If there were any living things at Hardhome a moon’s turn ago, there are none now. Melisandre was right,” he said gravely. “I could not save them after all.”

It was the prudent course, if disheartening. _Thousands of dead things… We will never win against so many._ It freed Tormund Giantsbane and several dozen rangers to follow Jon Snow south, though. 

“Who will you take to Winterfell?” said Satin.

“Tormund has promised me five hundred free folk,” said Jon. “Sigorn of Thenn may well help me, and that’s a hundred more. A handful of knights, too, if I can convince Queen Selyse to spare them.” That would likely be difficult; Satin had not seen the queen since the insurrection, but he’d heard she had turned paranoid with grief. For as many wildlings stood guarding the King’s Tower, queen’s men prowled its corridors, keeping watch over the locked door of Queen Selyse’s chambers. Still, most of the lords and knights left behind were hungry for battle, and Satin suspected they could be persuaded to leave their posts at a word from Melisandre. And yet…

He looked down at his hands. They were not as soft as they had been once — hard labour and cold days had cracked them till they bled. In Oldtown he had been learning to play the lyre; now his fingernails were bitten almost to the quick. _Is there nothing left that’s beautiful?_ he thought, and then felt frivolous for it.

Jon noticed his silence. “What is it?”

“Nothing, my lord. I was only thinking.”

“I know the queen’s men have been brawling with wildlings. It seems to me they would put aside their differences to avenge their king — if indeed Stannis is dead; Lady Melisandre doubts Snow’s word.” He held Satin’s gaze; Satin felt as though he were being prodded with a red-hot poker. “What do you think of them?”

“I think they belong at the Wall. Every one of them.”

“Why?”

Satin shook his hair from his face. “It’s where they send rapers, isn’t it, my lord?”

It did not make him feel any better, saying it aloud. Jon Snow was looking at him like he was a dying brother-in-arms, as if an impassable chasm had suddenly opened between them. “You can’t do anything about it, I know,” Satin said. “I’m not asking you for retribution. Take them, if you need the men.” Unspoken: _Just know what they did, and bear it. As I have._

“Maybe, then — maybe it’s better if they follow me,” Jon said softly. “Maybe there will be some justice on the battlefield, gods willing.”

“Perhaps, my lord.”

“It would be safer for you as well. They would not trouble you here.”

Satin frowned. Carefully he said, “How many rangers do you mean to bring with you?”

It was as he feared: Jon looked away, abashed. Another time it would have made Satin feel clever to have caught him out. “None of your own men?” he said.

“They aren’t my men any longer.”

 _I am,_ he thought. “Whose are they, then? Not Marsh’s, surely. There are men who would have followed you when you first asked; they’ll follow you now.”

“It’s not my place to ask them. I am not their lord commander,” Jon said. “ _Night gathers, and now my watch begins. It shall not end until my death._ The Wall is not mine any longer.”

“It makes no matter. Nothing has changed.” He felt foolish even as he said it, for he couldn’t imagine a world where more had changed. He cast around desperately for something to say. In the back of his mind a voice whispered, _Of course he will not take you, you heartsick fool; did you ever imagine you were his first choice of follower?_

“It’s desertion, Satin. How can I command rangers to follow me, when I don’t intend to return with them?”

“It doesn’t have to be rangers. You wouldn’t have to command anyone. Men would volunteer to follow you,” Satin said quickly.

“Greybeards who loved my lord father, and green boys seeking glory. I cannot bring a horde of stewards into battle.”

“A squire, then. You need a squire.”

Jon raised his hand. For one wild half-heartbeat Satin thought he was going to touch his hair. Instead, Jon held his hand over the cut at his throat. His voice came out a little louder when he said, “And what of your oaths? I’m hanging at least a dozen of my brothers already; not you, too.”

“You never told me your plan. You told the entire Shieldhall; you asked for volunteers. But I had to learn about everything after you were dead.” His face felt flushed; he cleared his throat. “Did you think I wouldn’t have gone, if you’d asked me to? Did you not want me to come?”

“No, Satin.”

“You made me your steward,” Satin said. “You made me conspicuous. You sent away my friends — _our_ friends. Then you did nothing as rumours flew; who do you suppose got the worst of it, you or I? And you cannot protect yourself from rumours, the way you might with daggers. If you had let me alone, I might have shaken my reputation quickly. But no one forgets the face of the lord commander’s whore. Now, if you leave again, what protection do I get?”

“ _Again_ ,” Jon Snow said softly.

Satin realized he was shaking. He folded his hands in his lap, and folded them again.

“I wish I hadn’t died,” said Jon.

“Very few would fault you for that.” Whether he meant the wishing or the dying, Satin wasn’t sure.

“Was it so bad for you? Truly?”

He was looking at Satin with upturned palms, and his eyes had softened for the first time. Just for a moment he looked so _young_ — not made of dead flesh at all, but boyish and green. _If only we were boys still,_ Satin thought. _If only either of us had ever been allowed to be just green boys._

“Not so bad,” he said.

“I thought I was helping you. And I thought that you were clever, and brave.”

“ _You_ were never the problem. I knew what would come with it, anyway; mostly it was more of the same. We were supposed to have longer. It would have faded, if there had been years.”

“I only wish there could have been.” Jon’s voice was hoarse.

He could not help himself. “There still might be,” Satin said. “You’re not doomed.” But then he looked at Jon’s face — the cracking skin of his cheeks, the hard flint of his eyes. Like old stone.

 _Your life doesn’t end when you take Winterfell,_ he might have said. Only, mightn’t it? Suppose he took Winterfell back from the Boltons; what was he meant to do then, rule like a corpse king? Or did he mean to walk its crypts like a restless ghost, till what was left of him dissolved? _All my brothers are dead,_ he had said. Maybe with a life so haunted, disappearing was the happy ending.

“Your sister,” Satin said.

Jon Snow understood. “She’ll be coming north to Castle Black. I’ll find her. I’ll — I’ll bring her home; give her men, advisers. I mean to see her well provided for.”

 _And then you mean to die._ He wanted to say, _This is not what your sister would wish_ ; but he had never met Arya Stark. He would not presume to know her, not to her own brother.

Instead Satin said, “You’ll leave us all to the Others.” He did not mean it bitterly, but Jon looked stricken. Satin placed his hand over Jon’s, and it felt comforting, ordinary, even, although he had never dared before to touch him so casually. “Oh, never mind that. Maybe you won’t die again, even if you do take back Winterfell. I don’t suppose your brother gave you the power to see the future.”

“No. He didn’t.” Jon looked down at their hands. He turned his palm upwards to meet Satin’s, and brushed his thumb over the back of Satin’s hand. Satin shivered. Perhaps Val had had the right of it, after all — his skin had the feel of hoarfrost, as though he had been born of the Night’s Queen herself. “I can… I can hardly feel it,” Jon said. “It’s like I’ve gone numb.”

“Nothing at all?” Satin squeezed his fingers. Did blood still flow in Jon Snow’s veins? He pressed his thumb to the base of Jon’s wrist, and felt nothing beating there.

“Hardly anything,” said Jon. “I feel as though… what I told you, when I saw my brother. Inside I’m burning up. But outside of me is ice.”

Satin did not know what to say to that, so he didn’t try to speak at all. He rubbed Jon’s hand between both of his, feeling the rough burns, the icicle-point tips of his fingers, as he had never dared to before. Jon watched him steadily. Satin brought their entwined hands to his mouth and breathed upon them. “Anything?” he murmured. Jon shook his head ever so slightly.

Satin could not look at him any longer. He pressed his lips to Jon’s knuckles. _Don’t go,_ he wanted to whisper against them. _Don’t die. Stay, and live, and live._

He stole a glance at Jon. He was watching him with an expression Satin had never seen him wear before. Hardly daring to breathe, he asked, “Nothing, my lord?”

“No,” said Jon Snow. Then: “Keep trying.”

Satin could not help but obey.

Jon’s hand opened, and Satin kissed his palm. Jon cupped his cheek. His eyelashes were fluttering; some of them had gone white the way his hair had, as if they were still coated with frost. He tugged on one of Satin’s curls, and this, too, felt like a command.

He felt as though he were standing atop the Wall looking over the edge. More memories, older, warmer, flashed before his eyes — flaming arrows, red-tinged snow, a girl with hair like fire lying in Jon Snow’s arms. Some small, dying part of him worked frantically at the last image, puzzling it into place; the boy he’d been in Oldtown, so long ago, whispering, _What does he like, how can you please him?_

He pushed it down and cupped Jon’s face, and brought their mouths together.

Even his kiss was cold. Satin could taste his breath, sharp and curiously clean, like snow on a windy night. Jon took a fistful of curls in his hand and pulled Satin toward him. He gasped despite himself, biting down on Jon’s lip. They tumbled together, Satin on Jon’s lap, Jon slipping an arm around Satin’s waist.

Satin ran a hand along the bare skin of Jon’s collarbone, fingers just skirting the wound at his throat; Jon winced and then pulled Satin closer. “Forgive me,” Satin whispered.

“What for?” was the reply.

He kissed into Jon’s mouth. His insides prickled like he’d just drunk a flagon of spiced wine. Their breath mingled, winter winds and summer heat. Jon’s hand sat at the small of his back like it was waiting for a sign.

He tasted blood suddenly. _Yours or mine?_ Satin might have said. He drew back and touched a finger to his lip. The cut there had reopened. Jon was looking at it with an expression that didn’t quite dare to be hunger.

“Who did that?” he asked Satin.

“No one. Me.”

“Satin.”

“Jon.”

Jon drew in a breath. _Well, I couldn’t be expected to call you “my lord” forever, now could I?_ “You needn’t hide it from me,” Jon said. “It’s not you I’m upset at.”

“I know that. I’m only saying that it makes no matter to me.”

“You must — you have to know I’d punish them, every last one, if I could. I feel as though…”

“It _isn’t_ your fault,” Satin insisted, before he could finish.

“I wish I could do something.”

“It wouldn’t help,” Satin said firmly. “I am no martyr, Jon Snow. But neither am I hungry for vengeance.” He wanted to tell him then the way he burned inside, thinking of those men, their knives and grasping hands. He did not have the words. But he said, “It’s no comfort to me. One day, maybe there will be justice; maybe I’ll be able to accept it. But not now.” He kissed the spot beneath Jon’s eye, where the old scar of an eagle’s talons sat.

Jon grew still, but after a moment, he reached up and wiped away the blood from Satin’s mouth. “What would be a comfort, then?” he said softly.

Satin thought about it and looked him in the eye. He kissed him, hard. Then he said, “Come to bed.”

Jon Snow might have been a vengeful ghost; but Satin was made of flesh and blood still, and now he prayed to whichever gods were listening, R’hllor or the trees or all the rest, _Let us live, and keep living, and let me go with him._

“Bolt the door,” said Jon.

Satin did as he was bid. He returned to Jon’s side — he was perched on the edge of the bed now, lips parted, watching Satin mournfully, as if he were seeing the last rays of summer sun fade away. Satin slipped the fur from around his shoulders, gently. He touched him with the flat of his hand, on his arms, his ribs, willing warmth back into his body.

Jon reached for the laces of Satin’s doublet. His fingers were stiff and clumsy as he undid them, and Satin moved to help. “No,” said Jon. “Let me.”

 _Let, let, let._ It was all a dance, a game played with gods and with each other; the bargaining, for more time, for an extra touch, a moment of respite from the cold. Suddenly he couldn’t bear it. _If you want to touch me, say so._ Why had he ever tried to cloak his own desires? Why had Jon Snow? Months of silence, of careful, deliberate touch — and yet how had it ended? With daggers in the dark, a public execution; men in power who had no fear of consequences. What was the point, he wondered, of obfuscation, prayers for patience, of staying in shadow? Something reckless throbbed in his chest like a wardrum. _Want me, if you do; kiss me or curse me, but don’t tolerate me._

He kissed him on his jaw; he bit his neck. Jon freed the last of the lacing and pushed the doublet off, then tugged on the woolen tunic beneath. Satin raised his arms over his head and slipped it off. Then he was bare-chested, shivering slightly, as Jon looked at him; looked with his head tilted slightly, a hand on Satin’s arm, as if it were Satin that bore the deepest wounds and not him.

Satin’s whole body hummed like a bowstring, as though yearning for a loosed arrow. “I’m cold,” he said.

Jon smiled. A small smile, and yet it softened his eyes. “So am I.”

…Then they were beneath the furs and heavy blankets, and Jon was tracing the divots of Satin’s spine… Their legs were bare, then, too; Satin’s hair fell in a tangle when he leaned down to kiss Jon’s chest… His mouth grew hot, as if he could taste the fire beneath his skin. He kissed him, and kissed him again…

Afterwards, they lay side by side, Satin half in dream. Jon kept his eyes closed; Satin thought he was sleeping, but could not be sure. Did he need to sleep anymore? His chest was so still it frightened Satin a little, but he did not wake him.

He tried to picture Winterfell. He had seen it once, travelling north along the Kingsroad, but had never been inside its walls. He tried to imagine himself standing in its courtyard now, walking its corridors; he couldn’t manage it. At the Wall he knew where he belonged, what he could aspire to. But a proper castle… that was too large for someone like him. _Perhaps it’s for the best, then. For both of us. And better to have a sweet ending, if an ending there must be._

When the fire had gotten low in the hearth Satin slipped from the bed and donned his tunic and breeches once more. He crept around Ghost, who had not stirred, and tried to coax the flames back to life. There was a water basin in one corner of the room; it was cold as ice, but he splashed some of it on his face anyway. He glanced over his shoulder to find Jon Snow looking at him.

“Will you help me dress?” he asked Satin.

His limbs were stiff. Satin had thought it was the cold, but now it occurred to him it was more likely decay. He helped Jon into the roughspun tunic and tucked it into his breeches. He laced the leather jerkin over the holes in his chest. Jon kept his gaze trained on Satin’s.

“You’ll make me miss a stitch,” Satin said when he caught his eye again.

“Have I done wrong, Satin?”

His heart skipped a beat. He looked away; Jon was staring plainly, brow furrowed. He tied off the laces and stepped away from him. “I’m no fair maiden,” he said. “My honour hasn’t been besmirched, if that’s what you mean.”

“No, I mean… I haven’t hurt you?”

It was a fair enough question. “No,” said Satin, after a long moment. “Have I hurt you?”

“Yes,” said Jon Snow. Satin was surprised. “That’s to say — we spoke of second chances. I mean to use mine to save my sister. But now I wish I had more… There is more I want to live for. More that I wish I had done.”

For some time there was no sound but the crackling of the fire, and the softest chimes of snow at the window. Eventually Satin spoke. “I think… I think a life can have more than one purpose. Mine has, at the least.” He touched Jon’s hair. “No man can predict what their purpose will be; nor any woman, either. Your fate may be with the wildlings, or with your sister. Today it may have been with me.” He smiled then, despite himself. “We’ll meet again, my lord. Even if you have to cut my head off for desertion afterwards.”

Jon Snow closed his eyes, and Satin stepped around him, pulling his hair back from his face. “I pray it never comes to that.”

“As do I.”

He was tying back Jon’s hair with an old scrap of twine when the horn sounded. One blast, then two.

A third.

**Author's Note:**

> constructive criticism is always welcome. i'm @ingydar on tumblr :-)


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